New disabled MP pledges to fight for inclusive education, and praises Commons staff

One of at least three new disabled MPs to be elected to parliament at this month’s general election says she hopes to help address the “depressing and unhappy legacy” left to disabled people by 14 years of Conservative-led governments.

Dr Marie Tidball also wants to play a part in increasing the number of disabled people in parliament, fight to improve inclusive mainstream education, and improve healthcare for disabled people.

She has also praised parliamentary staff for the work they have done since her arrival as a new disabled MP to make her first days as accessible as possible.

In an interview with Disability News Service (DNS), just five days after being elected as the new MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, in South Yorkshire, which she won with a 10 per cent increase in the vote share, she said House of Commons staff had “totally blown my expectations”, providing the best disability-related induction for a new position that she has experienced.

She received a call from the Commons workplace adjustments manager just a day after winning her seat, to discuss what support she would need.

She was allowed a temporary assistant to help with her bags on her first day, she received advice on finding an accessible parliamentary office, and staff booked temporary hotel accommodation for her near parliament.

She said: “As someone who has campaigned long and hard to try and find ways to increase the inclusion of disabled people in public life and in representation, I am really uplifted by this.

“They could not have made me more welcome; they could not have given me more support.”

The Commons authorities also arranged a run-through of the swearing-in process – which all MPs must go through – to check if there were any adjustments she would need.

This led to both her and the new Liberal Democrat MP for Torbay, Steve Darling – who has an assistance dog – being given their own joint slot, just after the speaker had finished his lunch last Wednesday, so they did not have to queue for a long time.

Initially, she had been told she would not be allowed to sit in the chamber until she had been sworn in (pictured) because there was “some rule that they thought meant you could lose your seat [if you did so and] hadn’t been sworn in properly”.

But she was allowed to sit as she waited for Darling to be sworn in.

She said: “Already, I think, people like Steve and I are having that impact because we’re saying, ‘Look, this isn’t going to work for us,’ and all of the staff are being so helpful.”

Even so early in the new parliament, she says, they are helping to make processes “more accessible for the disabled people that might one day want to do this”.

She is already speaking of wanting to increase the number of disabled MPs, and she says one way of doing that will be by being “visible” as a disabled person, including through media interviews.

“I very much feel there are 14 million disabled people stood behind me,” she says.

“There was David Blunkett when I was growing up, and a couple of other Labour MPs, but it was knowing that there was someone like David in the House of Commons at that time, who had a disability, that made me think, ‘Maybe one day I could do that.’

“And I really want disabled people of all age groups to see this and go, ‘Maybe one day I could do this, too.’

“I do feel that sense of duty to try and make sure that I am visible.”

Despite the efforts of Commons staff in making her first days as easy as possible, she says she will also have her “disability access hat on the whole time”, asking herself: “How can we make this process more accessible for other disabled people?”

Tidball is a disability rights activist, a legal researcher, and an experienced Labour councillor, with a law degree, a masters, and a doctorate in criminology, from the University of Oxford.

She says the impact of the last government on disabled people was “catastrophic”.

She told DNS: “There are currently four million disabled people living in poverty in the UK, and both the disability employment gap and disability pay gap are still widening.

“During the pandemic – you and I worked together in that period, during the pandemic – more than 60 per cent of Covid-related deaths were disabled people and I tried to do my best to shine a light on that as much as I could at that time.”

She spoke out repeatedly in her work and to DNS during the pandemic about the disproportionate number of deaths of disabled people from Covid.

Early in the pandemic, she edited a report which showed that the government’s policy-making had breached its duties to disabled people under both the Equality Act and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD).

She also accused the Conservative government of failing to “fulfil its national and international human rights obligations to disabled people” and later edited another report that found that the government’s National Disability Strategy had failed to address the “urgent challenges” posed by climate change and the pandemic.

Tidball believes that disabled people have seen a “decimation of their life and living standards over the past 14 years, and that’s the legacy of the last government”.

It is, she says, a “depressing and unhappy legacy”.

As a “newbie” MP, she says she plans to focus on at least three areas of policy, after spending the last 14 years “trying to understand what we could do to make a country that treats disabled people with dignity and respect”, while more recently also working out priorities for her constituency, and what would allow her to use the experience she has gained from her professional life.

One of those is to be a champion on “SEND issues” – special education needs and disabilities – which she says came up repeatedly in casework while campaigning to win her seat.

There will be hopes that she will be an important champion for inclusive education, and of the UNCRPD, which she refers to during the interview.

She says that improving inclusion in mainstream schools will “absolutely” be an important focus of her parliamentary work, including the need to train more staff “to better understand the EHCPs [education, health and care plans] and all the rules around SEND, but also how to better support SEND children in mainstream schooling”.

Tidball, who was herself “mainstreamed in a state school”, says: “It’s really key that disabled people are adequately supported through education.

“We need to make sure that mainstream schools are as inclusive as possible, and Labour’s pledges to break down barriers to opportunity will improve inclusivity for disabled children.”

Her “day job” in recent years – as coordinator of Oxford University’s Disability Law and Policy Project – has been working to ensure that the legal curriculum teaches about “disability rights, and policies relating to disabled people, and how we do research with disabled people and disabled people’s organisations”.

And with Labour pledging to broaden the school curriculum, she says she is “excited” to see how her government will do that, and she hopes they will be “thinking about the kind of things that we could be doing around teaching about the history of disabled people”.

She also confirmed that if Labour develops a new national disability strategy, she will hope to play a part in that.

She says: “Obviously that’s been my passion for the last 14 years.

“I’ve done a huge amount of work around that and critiquing previous governments’ disability strategies… and so I would very much want to contribute whatever skills and experiences that I could to that if that was something that they decided to do.”

She also wants to work on access to maternity care for disabled women, because of personal experience, and because it is “something that hasn’t been talked about very much at all”.

The third area she wants to focus on is improving healthcare for older people – there is a higher-than-average number of older people in her constituency – who have acquired impairments and long-term conditions due to working in heavy industry.

She has former pit villages, a steelworks and other industries in her constituency, and she says GPs particularly are often failing to pick up conditions caused by long-term exposure to some of these industrial workplace environments.

But as well as these three areas that she hopes to focus on, she also mentions the importance of her party’s plans to bring transport “back under public control”, which will be “really important for disabled people across the country”.

And she says she is “really passionate” about “the role of social housing to protect the health of the nation”, which is “about inclusive housing, but it’s also about better quality housing for children and young people”.

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